Tag: abraham

How popular is the baby name Abraham in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Find out using the graph below! Plus, see baby names similar to Abraham and check out all the blog posts that mention the name Abraham.

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Number of Babies Named Abraham

Posts that Mention the Name Abraham

Acronym baby names are officially a thing. Not a major thing, but still a thing. Acronym baby names I’ve come across include Ily, “I love you,” and Lya, “love you always.”

One type of acronym that seems to be trendy these days is the “AB_” acronym, in which the first two words are “always be” and the third is a verb in “-ing” form. They stem from ABC, “always be closing,” made famous by the movie Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). Variations I’ve heard include ABS (“always be shipping” or “always be “selling”), ABL (“always be learning”), a different ABC (“always be charging”), and even ABK (“always be knolling“).

So I wondered: Could we create an “always be” acronym that’s also a good baby name?

For the name to be pronounceable (unlike Abcde) the third letter would have to be a vowel. And I’d say the best vowels for the job — considering both the number of available verbs and the resulting acronym — are E and I. So let’s see what we can come up with for ABE and ABI…

ABE

Abe is typically a nickname for of Abraham, but Abe is also used as an independent name. In fact, dozens of U.S. babies have been named Abe (not Abraham) every year for many decades.

Here are my top five acronym possibilities for the name Abe:

ABE: “always be exploring”

ABE: “always be evolving”

ABE: “always be experimenting”

ABE: “always be embarking”

ABE: “always be excelling”

And here are some of the other verbs that could be used: earning, educating, empowering, encouraging, engaging, engineering, enhancing, enjoying, evaluating, examining, exceeding, and experiencing.

ABI

Abi, like the more familiar Abby, is a short form of Abigail. Abi isn’t common as an independent name, but usage has picked up a bit recently.

Here are my top five acronym possibilities for the name Abi:

ABI: “always be imagining”

ABI: “always be innovating”

ABI: “always be improving”

ABI: “always be inspiring”

ABI: “always be initiating”

And here are some of the other verbs that could be used: illuminating, implementing, impressing, improvising, increasing, influencing, informing, inspecting, integrating, interacting, interpreting, and investigating.

What are your favorite “always be” acronyms for Abe and Abi?

Do you think anyone out there has used an “always be” acronym as a baby name yet?

In generations past, was it advantageous for a black man to have a distinctively black name?

Yes, according to a study published recently in the journal Explorations in Economic History.

Researchers Lisa D. Cook, Trevon D. Logan, and John M. Parmanc analyzed over 3 million death certificates from Alabama, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina from 1802 to 1970. They looked specifically at the life expectancy of men with the following distinctively black names:

Abe, Abraham

Alonzo

Ambrose

Booker

Elijah

Freeman

Isaac

Isaiah

Israel

King

Master

Moses

Percy

Perlie, Purlie, Pearlie

Presley, Presly

Prince

Titus

What did they find?

That black men with these names lived more than a full year longer (on average) than other black men. In fact, according to the abstract, “[a]s much as 10% of the historical between-race mortality gap would have been closed if every black man was given a black name.”

So what’s behind this beneficial effect?

It’s hard to say, but Lisa D. Cook believes that the black men with Biblical names specifically could have been “held to a higher standard in academic and other activities […] and had stronger family, church or community ties,” and that this could have played a part in their relative longevity.

The registrar of Providence, Rhode Island, published a series of documents listing all “of the names of persons deceased, born and married in the city of Providence” during years 1866, 1867 and 1868. The series may have been longer, but these are the only documents I could find online.

I’ve finally finished creating a set of rankings using one of the documents — 1867. But before we get to the rankings, here are some stats:

1,547 babies were born in Providence in 1867, going by the number of babies listed in the document itself. According to the document’s introduction, though, the number is 1,625. Not sure what to make of this discrepancy.

1,431 of these babies (713 girls and 718 boys) had names that were registered with the government at the time of publication. The other 116 babies got blank spaces. Either their names hadn’t been registered yet, or they hadn’t been named yet, or perhaps they died young and never received a name.

Husband and I passed a string of signs for Moab (the city in Utah) while driving to Arches National Park last week. Husband eventually asked, “Where does the word Moab come from? Is it Native American?”

It was a good guess — we’ve certainly spotted Native American place names (Kaibito, Kanab, Paragonah, Parowan, etc.) on road trips through the Southwest before — but Moab is actually biblical. I couldn’t recall at the time if it referred to a person or a place, but I told him that the ab probably meant “father” as it does in Hebrew names like Abigail and Abraham.

Now that I’m back at my computer and can access the magical Internet, I see that Moab was the name of a person in the Old Testament — a guy who was both the son and the grandson of Lot, via incest (lovely) — and that Moab’s descendants were the Moabites, who inhabited a region also known as Moab. The etymology of the name isn’t known, but theoretical definitions include “from the father,” “seed of father,” “who’s your father,” and (a non-father possibility) “the desirable [land].”

The Utah settlement was dubbed “Moab” sometime during the 1800s, but many early residents were not fans of the name and at least two attempts were made to change it: the first in 1885 (to Uvadalia), the second in 1890 (to Vina). Both attempts failed.

So has Moab ever been used as a personal name in modern times?

Sure has. Though it’s never appeared on any of the SSA’s baby name lists, I’ve found hundreds of people in the U.S. with the name, several born as recently as the 1990s. According to the records I’ve seen, the name was used most often as a boy name, and it was most popular during the 1800s. Unlike Sedona, though, Moab doesn’t have a strong in-state following; most Moabs were born in the Southeast/Bible Belt area.

What do you think of the name Moab? Usable generally, usable for religious folks only, too bizarre to be usable at all…?

The list was created by amateur genealogist G. M. Atwater as a resource for writers. It contains names and name combinations that were commonly seen in the U.S. from the 1840s to the 1890s. Below is the full list (with a few minor changes).